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This is the second part of a two-article series on a way to support Leadership Development that is radically effective, gives any organization an instant competitive advantage, and costs little.

In a previous post I described the difference between “flat” learning (shorter-term, skills-based, cognitive, discrete, disconnected) and “vertical” (longer-term, deep and unifying, all-encompassing). I noted that vertical learning leads you to form increasingly sophisticated understandings of yourself and the world, which in turn help you handle complexity. The world is complex, it goes without saying. And leadership challenges get increasingly complex as you move up the ladder, so to prepare people for them, investment in vertical learning makes sense. I also noted that we’re all slowly growing on this deep, meaningful level, anyway–especially if we’re in challenging roles–so the trick is not so much to conceive of and shoehorn a wholly new and foreign way of learning into a workplace ecosystem: supporting vertical development just means you find ways to amplify, reinforce, improve, intensify, or engage healthy processes that are already there.

What would it look like to improve vertical learning at work? Here’s a recipe.

Assess in a Topic Area: Decision-Making

It’s a principle of improvement that if you can see how you’re doing, you can improve faster: this “seeing how you’re doing” is, of course, assessment. Advanced assessments emerging in recent years can give us a sense of where we are on the life-long track of vertical learning; known as “developmental” assessments, these tools feel different than other tests: they use open-ended questions, or a guided conversation, to lead you to talk about the world, and they look for deep structures in your thinking that are visible through the way you talk about things. One of my favorite of these assessments is the Subject Object Interview, which can tell you your level of development according to Robert Kegan’s scale of ego development. But the assessment I am thinking of for leadership development is a different one: it’s the Lectical Decision-Making Assessment (LDMA), created by a spunky nonprofit specializing in developmental assessment: Lectica. The LDMA uses open-ended questions to measure your vertical level in the context of decision-making, according to the much-researched “Lectical Scale” of hierarchical complexity. Why this particular content area? There are other ways to approach leadership: through ethics or reflective judgment, for instance. The advantage of decision-making is that is it as once practical and deep: decision-making is perhaps themost important facet of leadership; after all, making decisions is what leaders do. So getting better at it pays dividends immediately; but it is also a rich terrain of philosophical inquiry, drawing on a complex expanse of ideas, concepts, and frames of meaning, so it’s a fruitful context for working through the layers of ambiguity and complexity that you will encounter as you progress on the vertical dimension.

Make that Assessment an Embedded, Formative Assessment

So now we have a way to assess your vertical level in the topic area of decision-making. But we need to do more than assess your level; we need to think of that assessment as part of a regular, ongoing learning process. We need to commit to working on improving in vertical learning over a long term period (say, of years). For one thing, that’s the time scale of change in vertical learning; for another, if we can commit to investing a little time, then we get two special gifts: first, we can use the assessment regularly to show us how well we are progressing; that makes it an “embedded” part of the learning process. But more importantly, we can use the data from the assessment to directlyhelp us progress. The LDMA, for instance, tells us how we are thinking now, but it also tells us how we are about to think. Because it is built on a scale of increasing complexity that extends well beyond anyone besides Einstein, the LDMA knows what’s coming for us. Importantly, it doesn’t obscure this knowledge: it openly describes the next step on our path in a way that’s accessible to us, and even intriguing. Using an assessment this way is “formative.” The LDMA makes its formative use particularly easy by going one step further. It offers individualized learning recommendations targeted to our learning level, from articles and books to specific hands-on activities.

Add Back Some “Flat” Learning

So we have a long term commitment to learning, and an assessment that both tells us where we are on the level of vertical development in decision-making and helps us see and work towards the next step. That’s a lot already; but we can add more. We started this article by making a distinction between “flat,” skills-based, short-term learning, and vertical development. But in truth there is no real reason to exclude flat, shorter-term learning just because we’re working on vertical; in fact, the two go together. In whatever context we work in, there is a constellation of key skills used on a regular basis that you might reasonably want to work on as you gain in experience–and you might address these skills in a sequence of short bursts of learning. This, in fact, is the approach of most Leadership Development programs. The LDMA recognizes the value of a combined approach and identifies a handful of skills important in decision-making, among them: communicative capacity, perspective taking, perspective seeking, perspective coordination, argumentation, and decision-making process. It assesses them at the same time it assesses your vertical level: this adds an additional dimension to the assessment; now we’re not just assessing your growth at the deep, vertical level, but we have some focused, practical skills related to that growth that we can also work on simultaneously.

So now we have a lot of data: in the domain of decision-making, we’re looking at how we’re doing at deep levels of vertical development, and we’re tracking how well we do in a variety of relevant associated skills, any one of which might have been the centerpiece of any other leadership development program. We also have a list of resources and activities we might undertake as part of our learning. The challenge now becomes mining the data for the parts that are most relevant to us, and thinking about what to do. We’re looking, in other words, for our growth edge: the individualized, deeply personal part of our learning that seems most compelling and rewarding to us. How we frame and think about this will be different for everyone; but the point for everyone is to design some activities that would activate or instantiate or explore that learning edge: research, real-world engagement, experiments, conversations. These activities we will frame as short term, iterative learning projects. Lectica’s way of modeling these is helpful: they use the acronym “VCoL,” or Virtuous Cycles of Learning, to describe the components of successful learning activities: for each, you should make sure you’re engaging in a fully-formed process that starts with a goal, seeks information, applies it, reflects, and sets a subsequent new goal. We’re creating a process, that, if it works, can continue indefinitely; in fact, a Lectical assessment is designed to give you a year’s worth of data to unpack and explore in this way.

One key point: the design and implementation of these individualized learning sequences happens in the normal ebb and flow of life and work–it’s not something that requires an off-site–it therefore avoids the well-known problem of learning transfer, and it’s immediately effective. The workplace effectively becomes the place of learning, supported by the use of the assessment, and under the guidance of a coach. Which brings me to my next point.

Use a Coach

Does all of this sound like a lot? It is. Processing the rich data from the LDMA, considering how it reflects your life and work, comparing what you’re learning there to what you’re seeing elsewhere in your life, looking for central themes that can evolve into your growth edge, identifying ways to design VCoLs that instantiate the learning in meaningful and practical ways, implementing and following up on those VCoLs: that’s a lot to do on your own, while you still have a job to do and a life to live, and an even bigger job if you you’re new to the ideas of vertical learning, VCoL design, decision-making, formative assessment, and so on. For that reason, I think you’ll do better with a coach: someone ideally very familiar with the assessment you’ll be using, expert at identifying growth edges, comfortable with designing personalized learning around those growth edges, familiar with what it takes to implement an iterative sequence of personalized learning activities, and able to help you make sense of everything. Fortunately, coaching with the LDMA is similar to other developmental coaching (like Immunity to Change, for example), and Lectica provides coaching certification training, so there is a rich pool of coaches available to draw from.

Instant Competitive Advantage: But at What Cost?

Assessing regularly with a developmental assessment; using that assessment in an embedded, formative way; mining the data to develop and implement personalized learning activities in your context; and working with a coach: these are the key components of what I think make a remarkably robust and, really, revolutionary way to support vertical development of leadership. There is very little extant in the workplace that can compare in terms of the learning enabled: this approach has such dramatic potential to increase an individual’s ability to lead, I see it as an immediate competitive advantage for any organization that undertakes it. But what is the cost? Let’s think about that for a minute. The cost of the assessments is minimal; Lectica is a nonprofit committed to keeping costs low; so the investment is essentially the time invested and the cost of the coach. If we imagine a coach working with you every few weeks for a year; at, say, 20 sessions of an hour each, we’re looking at something like $2,000 – 3,000 per person; at scale it’s cheaper. A coach working full time might manage 40 or 50 program participants, for example, as well as perform some administrative and reporting duties (reporting on the progress of the program, for instance).

Alternative: Use A Developmental Assessment With Your Leadership Development Program

Maybe hiring a coach full time or paying $2,000 as in individual feels like a lot. Maybe you already have an active, successful leadership development program that you don’t want to throw out! If this is the case, there are alternatives. One is to continue to use your program to focus on the identified skills you deem important to leadership in your context, and to supplement it with the LDMA, or other developmental assessments, to begin to add a component that supports vertical learning. Doing so has a lot of advantages. Among them: you’ll only be paying the price of the assessments themselves; they can serve as objective assessments of what is being learned in your leadership program; and, because they are designed for a variety of contexts and topics, one or more of them will likely touch on whatever skills you are specifically targeting, and so help reinforce those skills in a formative way.

I was recently asked about the tension between “instructing” and “coaching” in a coaching context. My impromptu thoughts.

Using an instructive approach can efficiently give context, direction, a sense of definiteness, reassure a worried coachee, and may be the most comfortable coaching paradigm for people at certain orders of development. I’m thinking of linear thinkers, perhaps, who “want answers.” It might also be OK for a more advanced thinker, a gifted autodidact, or a fellow teacher or coach, who is comfortable with the development environment, addicted to creating their own learning cycles–who just needs a hint of the path and they’re off to the races. Instruction seems necessary if you’re in a situation where you have a limited time and you have some fixed goal you need to meet in that time (though I can’t imagine any coach seeking out such constraints). The downside is that there isn’t much room for the coachee to participate in the meaning-making; little co-learning; which means less learning for the coachee and the coach, too (!). Your coachee will be mostly “recording” data during the session in order to (hopefully) reflect, process, and apply later; and maybe as a coach you’re not operating at your growth edge either–you maybe be a bit of an automaton rattling off wisdom. So you lose some learning opportunities. There is a consequence to the relationship, too, because an instructional style can be a distancing move.

The coaching approach is preferable if you want to create a space for working and learning together, to partner in understanding what is going on in the general assessment and to conceive of, develop, implement, and build on applications of the knowledge in that assessment in the coachee’s social context. Coaching is also a better transition to a self-sufficient coachee: you’re thinking with them, and going through experiments and applications with them. Because they’re more actively involved, they’ll have a better chance of building habits, skills, and awarenesses that can continue after the coaching sequence is over.

I think you will ultimately blend both approaches as a coach. There are parts of even an extreme-coaching-style coaching process that require a kind of meta-narrative that can feel like instruction (here’s what we’re going to do), and there are also parts where you need to step out of coaching and give context (here’s what this means; this is what I say to folks when we get to this part). And even if you’re leaning instruction, it would be unusual that you don’t invite some kind of input and engagement from the coachee. No matter how much you are in control, it would be strange not to respond to or allow to develop a question or, better yet, spontaneous recognition on the part of the coachee, and that’s coaching.

An additional thought: I think it is actually very difficult to resist instructing, to get out of the comfortable seat of your knowledge and control and be available to the coachee’s perspective . . . or perhaps it is better to say to be suspended between your knowledge and the moment and the coachee’s perspective. Edgar Schein calls the problem “content seduction,” and advocates against it in his recent book Humble Consulting. This is the master move that gifted and experienced teachers and coaches learn at some point, but I don’t really see people doing that right out of the gate, and it feels like it requires a developmental stage. 11 on the Lectica scale, or 4 on Kegan.

Which style am I inclined to use? Coaching with instruction in reserve. My plan is usually to frame the session around key points and themes that emerge from the data we are gathering. I float these points for discussion when it feels natural–often I don’t need to, because the points tend to float themselves, because the coachee sees them, too–and then I approach them each from a perspective of mutual inquiry. “I noticed this. Does this seem interesting to you, too? What is your take? How shall we think about this?” There will be places I will need to instruct. What does a particular term mean? Where are we in whatever process we are following? What is our next step? So I’m prepared to say something at those points. (Although often I don’t need to: even the instructive pieces seem to “say” themselves.)

I was thinking today about the influential book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan. It suggests ways that slight shifts in tone or nuance or perspective can more or less instantly transmute a difficult or problematic context into a productive one.

The shifts come in the realm of language. Lahey and Kegan suggest you can move easily from a way of talking that’s less productive to one that’s more productive. There are multiple pre-fabricated language movements you can make. My favorite example? Complaint.

With very little effort, the language of complaint (limiting) can be modulated into the language of commitment (inspiring). How? Well the leverage point or hinge is to know that both languages have buried in them a sense of values, a longing, an ethics, a desire for a certain way of life, a need to be connected or valued. In the language of complaint these virtuous components are kind of hidden or implied, but in the language of commitment they are the message itself.

For example, let’s say I don’t feel like my boss gives me enough opportunities to take charge of a project, to show what I can do, to stretch, to lead. If I focus on how bad that makes me feel, and if I don’t talk to her about it directly–“My boss won’t let me try anything new, she doesn’t value me, etc”–that’s the language of complaint. But the point here is that wanting to be trusted with leadership roles, that’s a positive thing, that’s a virtue buried in the complaint–and that’s worth talking about. It shows a path towards a different kind of relationship with your boss, one your boss might even like. Or at least be willing to try out with you. Rephrasing in terms of commitment would look something like this: “Hi boss! I would really like to have a chance to lead a project. I feel I can do a good job for the organization, and it would feel good to see the organization supporting my growth. I realize there’s some risk here because I’ve not led a project before. Can we discuss it?”

The second option, though it has the same, as it were, problem-DNA (not getting to lead a project) as the original phrasing, has a different solution-DNA: it posits a completely different world view. One where organizational and individual growth are both possible. As opposed to one where the organization is seen (by the complainer) to proscribe the individual’s development possibilities.

The shift is as simple as using different words! Ok, it’s more complicated than that. Of course, you’re thinking, there is a different way of thinking going on in the two languages. A different way of thinking, a different way of being with people, a different comfort with risk, a different role for the self, a different assumption about what should happen at work . . . a lot of things. It is a language shift, because you are changing the words you use. But much more is shifting, too. In this way it reminds me of downhill skiing pedagogy. When you learn to downhill ski, you are often taught (among other things) to just look where you want to go–that is, you turn your head to face the place you want to go–whereupon your legs and feet and hips and skis and the slope all align as it were magically to get you there. This language shift is like that. You shift your words, and the rest clicks in. The point is you get there.

I will speak to one other point, which seems important, if tangential. One of the things governing the language of complaint is fear; the language of commitment exposes fear to sunlight, and that can be scary. When we complain, something is bothering us. We don’t feel good. But, importantly, there’s the potential of a worse feeling resulting from any action that keeps us from doing anything about it. In our example, the complainer doesn’t like not being trusted to lead. But if he talks about it with the boss, he might find out that the boss really doesn’t think he’s capable. That would be hard to bear. Worse still, if he asks to lead, he might get to lead! And then there’s a chance he might publicly fail. And that would be the hardest to bear of all. Hard enough to bear that even the specter of the possibility of having to experience it keeps the complainer comfortably tucked in his language of complaint, even though it’s no fun either. It’s a known and manageable discomfort.

It would take quite a little bit of introspection for our complainer to catch himself in this loop and work his way out; Lahey and Kegan’s “language” shift offers him an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. He can look back from having successfully led a project and wonder how he got there.

We held the second successful incarnation of the Learning Organization Academy this week. A second wave of feedback from our participants and speakers is coming in. More than ever I’m reconfirmed in my sense that LOA (as we call it) is a wonderful, necessary, unusual professional development program. What exactly do we do there? Here’s what I think: we try to paint a picture of what a learning culture looks like, and we try to empower people to seek that culture, using our “way.”

The Learning Picture

What does a learning culture look or feel like? It’s seeing people not as individual units but as a complex adaptive system, a kind of hyper-complexity of interconnectedness interwoven with a sense–an ethical call–that the parts and the connections between the parts and the overall system can and should continuously improve, develop, evolve, adapt, become more capable, understand more, see more, be more, do better, do more good.

It’s a feeling you’re with people who perceive you deeply and care about your development. It’s chatter, it’s movement, it’s connectedness. It’s a fascination with information or idea flow and with sharing and with perspectives. It’s information residing in between and among people. It’s a suspension of the individual and the group. It’s a hyper-individualism suspended in a bionic group. It’s icky and wonderful and true and healing and difficult to hear and necessary and life-changing like support groups and Alcoholics Anonymous. But it’s also intellectually challenging, mind-blowing, inspiring, visionary, like great keynotes or Ted Talks or moments of wonderful brainstorms or getting, say, Spinoza for the first time. It’s a kind of platonic intimacy. It’s also mindful, calm, reflective, consolidating, simplifying, like the presence of a great meditation teacher.

It’s not superficially happy, as in the avoidance of bad feelings from fear of them; because it involves a desire to improve, it requires a constant grappling with discomfort. Because it’s learning, it involves real, meaningful, true feedback. You’re supported in the grappling, though. It asks you to re-evaluate or put in context a bunch of existing structures you’ve absorbed and perhaps not really considered, that we use to make sense of the work world (and life), like production, power, authority, efficiency, limits, boundaries, success, rules, norms, the bottom line.

It’s a delight in the awareness of yourself improving, as you had when you were a kid, and a happiness in being able to help people improve, as you have when you are a parent or a teacher or a coach. Mixed with the joy of doing what you love or the simple wonder of perceiving the natural world. All this with the kind of sense of collective achievement you would have from, say, working on the crew of a winning America’s Cup yacht. It’s Maslow’s idea of a society of self-actualized people, plus the feel of the classroom in Alfie Kohn, plus the lab-like discovery in Eleanor Duckworth’s The Having of Wonderful Ideas, plus the fascination and love and being-with-people that the humanistic psychologist Carl Rodgers models, plus the mindfulness of the Buddha, plus the curiosity and intellectual stimulation of, say, Richard Feynman. Plus the fun of learning to whistle. Plus the crinkly-eyed humor of a whimsical anecdote. It’s learning and being with people the way you wish you could.

The LOA Way

So that’s the picture. So how do we help people get there? What’s our “way?” Well, we do share some tips, tricks, techniques, approaches, projects, perspectives. But I think the main part of what we do is not so much to give technological or instrumental advice or answers but to model or encourage a way of being or a disposition or an attitude.

This didn’t quite come to me until I reviewed the website of another professional development program shortly after LOA had ended. This program struck me as embodying a kind of industrial-masculine-skills-fixed-knowledge-surgical-breathless-mechanical approach. It was about learning discrete things and applying them. Cause and effect. Focused-intellectual-logical-IQ stuff. Intensely individual. Maybe I picked up a sense of underlying anger or conviction or intensity. It was a closing trap. Fixing, fixing, fixing. Driving. Mechanical.

The LOA way is the opposite. It’s perhaps more feminine, organic, slow. It’s about perception, appreciation, spaciousness, and joy. It’s about the context, replacing the parts in the whole, resolving dualities, healing divisions, not rushing to solutions, yet embracing spontaneity, thinking, being mindful, sensing, sensing, doing less, questioning certitude, imaging other possibilities, sloughing off a veneer of sophistication or adulthood or responsibility for a cultivated youthfulness or naiveté. It’s perhaps primarily about seeing and understanding the richness and beauty of things as they are as much as it is about gentling nudging them along.

I’ve been thinking about the right balance of learning and performance at work. Or the balance of disruption and consistency of action, or of painfully self-aware norm-forming and happy living within established norms.

I say disruption because I think significant learning–adaptive, as opposed to technical–is disruptive. Especially at work. At some level you are re-thinking an assumption, a rule, an understanding, a belief, and while you are in between the old rule and the rule you replace it with, you are uncomfortably aware of two alternate interpretations of the world, and you can’t float along with autopilot engaged, as we all prefer.

This disruption isn’t that big a thing when you’re in school. On the one hand, you’re used to it, because you’re reforming rules constantly. On the other, you’re not that far away from your early years, when your whole existence was a messy and constantly discombobulating attempt to understand what was going on around you. And the school environment reinforces you. You’re learning things with a peer group. You’re helped by an expert who’s led people your age through the ideas you’re facing time and again. All your time is essentially set aside for you to learn, and society is happy with you doing it. But perhaps most importantly, there’s a certain philosophical remove from what you’re learning. It isn’t yet you. Whether you really getMoby Dick or Astrophysics isn’t going to deeply affect what you think about yourself and who you are and threaten whether you can pay your mortgage and send your kids to school.

Not so at work. Here learning is harder and more disruptive, because what you’re learning is a sapper’s tunnel to your identity. The rules and norms and behaviors and beliefs that are changed in workplace learning are linked to our image of ourselves as professionals, to our sense of belonging to a social group, to our belief in our power to influence people, to protecting ourselves from shame, and then through the transverse theory of the paycheck, they’re linked as well to our sense of financial and familial stability. Our workplace norms in a sense pay our mortgages, put food on the table, get us a Bosch dishwasher, etc. These thoughts are all connected in one big constellation of dark matter stars, and it’s a way we deal with living in an uncertain world.

If you start to question workplace beliefs and rules, you trigger this system. “If what I have been doing,” people will think to themselves on a certain level, “and what people around me have done for years, and what I painfully learned the hard way to do, etc., isn’t totally right, then . . . uh oh . . . I might not be able to do the new thing expected of me,, I might loose face in the workplace, I might loose influence over the world around me, I might be exposed to shame, I might not be able to pay my mortgage, I might not be able to get food, and there goes the Bosch dishwasher, etc . . .”

That’s what I mean when I say learning is disruptive, especially at work.

But of course we have to learn. To change, to adapt. As individuals, as teams, as organizations, as a society. In a world of constant flux, that is the one constant, everyone is agreed. You can either figure out a way to activate or initiate your own learning and change in some controlled and regulated system, like a prescribed burn, or you can wait and have external change, which you can’t control, wash over you like a tsunami, or wildfire.

The idea of the learning organization is basically the former–instead of thinking that we can achieve a stable state, to refer to Donald Schon’s book Beyond the Stable State, we accept that our context is always changing, and we try to find and bake in ways to help ourselves constantly and consistently learn and change. If external change obligations come along, fine, we’ll take advantage of them; if not, we won’t sit around eating pistachios, we’ll concoct our own internal change obligations.

So given that learning and change at work are disruptive and highly anxiety-provoking, how do you do that? How do you manage to do them regularly, consciously, intentionally? Clearly you can’t change everything everyone is doing or question everything everyone is believing all at once. Without some amount of consistency of behavior and expectations, the organizational identity dissolves. We don’t know why we’re here and what we’re doing. Chaos ensues.

I like Edgar Schein’s idea. The leader of the learning organization, he says, in my beloved chapter 20 of Organizational Learning, has to simultaneously assuage his team’s anxieties and prompt people to learn and change in some particular area. “We’re ok in general, but in this little bit, we need to do something differently,” she would say. We have to, that is, finesse a kind of propping up of the existing norms, while we rewrite some of them. It’s about a balance, or a percentage. We have to reinforce our status quo in, say 80% of our work, while we help people deconstruct and reform the status quo in the other 20%. It’s like a rolling blackout, but it’s not a blackout, it’s a spotlight.

But what would the right percentage of learning–the disruption percentage— be? I think the 80/20 rule probably works just as well as any other. I come at it from the opposite angle–If you take the reciprocal of work, when we’re learning full-time, in college, say, and you look at the ratio of learning to performance, you come up with something close to the 80/20 rule reversed. The average college student, say, works 10 hours a week, and has four classes, each roughly 10 hours a week, when you add up class time and homework. That’s a 20/80 work/learn rule, and we can induce from it that full-time work could be the opposite and do OK. In addition, it’s the percentage Google has seized upon in its famous workplace learning initiative.

Of course you’ll ask, percentage of what? Of time, of units worked, of number of work “categories”? I think you can use whatever metric you settle on with your team to organize what you do. It’s a rule of thumb, after all.

The point is to be humble in the breath and scope of your norm-changing initiatives, but be bold in the consistency and continuousness which which you inexorably promote them.

Knowledge, according to Bill, is not abstract, fixed, and unconnected from life. It’s “situated, tacit, dynamic;” “social;” and “practical.” It’s interwoven between and among people and what they’re doing and need to do, in the environment where they are. Correspondingly, learning is largely informal, is built on communication and connections—stories, conversations, experiences, coaching. It depends heavily on trust and reciprocity.

Communities of Practice Steward Messy Knowledge

The kind of knowledge and learning above aren’t that well-served by formal education. What works better are communities of practice–groups of people sharing a particular domain of knowledge who gather and talk about what they know and what they do. The emphasis is on social relationships and communication; communities of practice are heterarchical as opposed to hierarchical. There isn’t a rigid power or control structure; they grow up where people who share a particular passion feel a need to talk to each other. They’re voluntary. As such they stand in contrast to the hierarchical workplace, its emphasis on control and outcomes, and its investment in its own existence. They can be “natural” in that they occur on their own when a few people find their way together, and intentional, in that people actively develop them, though this is an art. They can be conceptualized using a three-mode framework: domain (or subject matter); community (the people); and practice (how they apply the knowledge they share).

Peripheral and Core Participation

A key feature of communities of practice is that they allow for a variety of ways to be involved. You don’t have to be an expert: peripheral participation, or lurking, is OK, and even seen positively (because it’s a way to enter into the field—consider the apprenticeship model). Usually, though, a core group comprising 3 – 5% of the people ends up being responsible for most of the activity of the community; these people are generally experts and well-respected (though there is a role for some in that core group to focus on the organizational details who don’t therefore need to be a subject mater expert). Importantly, the community of practice allows you to shift from lurker to middle to core group and back—in fact, you can see that movement as a kind of sideways Zone of Proximal Development.

Distinction Between Communities of Practice and Project Teams

Bill makes a key distinction between communities of practice, which self-organize to shepherd the learning in a social group, and project teams, which are formed, usually by fiat, to achieve a particular end. The community of practice focuses on knowledge sharing, is voluntary, has a long-term focus, boundaries are permeable, and the nature of the group is often emergent; the team is different—it has a clear outcome in mind, it gathers information on whether it meets that goal or not, it ends, roles are kinda fixed, it reports back. The project team works well in the hierarchical workplace of course; but it’s not antithetical to the community of practice. A project team can peel off of a community and go work on a project then share outcomes with the community. Just don’t assign a discrete, short-term, actionable goal to the overall community.

Phases of Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice go through various stages: Potential (basic parts are there: topic, social group, desire to share); Coalescing (community begins to work together and build trust); Maturing (clarification of the subject, individual roles; identification of gaps in knowledge); Stewardship (focus on action and maintaining momentum, attracting new members, keeping knowledge up-to-date); Transformation (its work may be done; members may leave; it may go dormant to return later). Bill notes that it’s important to accept the community where it is—the stewardship phase isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal, for instance: a community may function perfectly well and serve its members even in the early stages.

Things to Avoid

There are some things you shouldn’t do if you want your community of practice to be successful. You can’t tell it what to do—the passion has to come from the people involved (although you can find and build on existing passions). You need the domain to be somewhat practical and problematic; if it’s too superficial—that is, only about relationships and pleasantries, it won’t work. The topic also can’t be too narrow or too broad. You have to be wary as well of problems that occur in all communities: cliques and factions, and people who “squelch” or “spoil.” And a key pitfall: “impermeable boundaries”–if people can’t move from the fringes to the core group and every stage in-between, it’s not a heterarchy anymore.

Communities of Practice Improve Performance

You might think such an ephemeral structure might not result in anything tangible, but it does—those relationships and passions drive the participants to “build, share, and apply” core practices and capabilities, increasing their capability, and all that of course translates to improved performance outcomes.

If we really want to build learning organizations, they should of course take into account how the brain works; fortunately, we might already be heading in the right direction: chris notes that the literature on organizational growth and change is remarkably consistent with how the brain operates.

Learning Should Include Thinking, Feeling, and Interacting

The brain’s major regions focus on three key areas: social (watching what other people do, emulating it), executive (making decisions, plans, interpretations), and emotional processing (feeling and dealing with how we feel about things). All three are integral to how the brain works; all three should be a recognized part of a learning organization (consider to what extent cognitive / executive thought is privileged now in most organizations and higher education).

Memory and Learning are Active

“Memory and learning are something you do,” said Chris. Rather than files retrieved from an efficient archive, the process of remembering is more similar, for Chris, to an archeological dig (!). Each memory is a product of reconstruction and re-interpretation (!) of a bunch of scattered bits. And the same for learning: rather than receiving knowledge as a jukebox might receive coins, we’re actually building the things we know association by association.

The Brain is Not Neat

“The brain is built to be sloppy,” Chris said. There’s a trade-off between the kinds of mental structures and processes that make for efficient memory and the kind that allow for creativity; the brain allows some sloppiness and inefficiency so we can make new connections, associate unlikely things, invent our way out of a tight corner. But in exchange we’re imperfect warehouses.

Engage or Forget

The most important thing in remembering or learning something new is to use the information actively. Engagement is even more important than overall time spent. Talk about it, write about, do something with it. Otherwise it’s gone in 24 hours, says Chris; 60 to 80% of your learning should require you to be engaged, he said; and he therefore suggested we use symbols to capture the key points of his talk (writing or images). He also stopped every few minutes to challenge us in groups with a provocative question or two. “The person doing the talking is the one doing the learning,” he said.

Prompts

The brain uses prompts and incentives to help it learn. Prompts relate to its powerful predictive ability: to survive we need to know what effects follow from what causes; we’re so good at associating effects with causes that after even one highly-charged cause-effect sequence, the brain will subsequently predict the outcome of any similar cause and feel and act as if the effect had happened, even if it hadn’t. Every time you see a certain person, they frown at you? After a while you start to feel frowned-at just by thinking of that person. Good learning understands this strong promptability and tries to unpack and discharge prompt-associations that impede learning, and kindle positive ones that encourage it.

The Three Rules of Feedback

Incentives work on the other end of the cause and effect sequence–a positive outcome makes the brain feel good, and it remembers what it did to get that; then it’s more likely to do that thing later. This process is what makes feedback work so well; as long as feedback is useful, consistent, and rapid, you can effectively learn just about anything. Including to control anything the body does–even lowering high blood pressure certain degrees at your will, slowing down or speeding up your digestive tract, or keeping sperm (if you have them) from swimming. These body-related learnings require a biofeedback monitor of some kind and are done in the lab, but still: if you can control the speed at which food passes through your intestines, you can make all sorts of changes in any of your behaviors.

Transfer Requirements

For learning in one situation to be called upon in another, thus achieving the famous holy grail of “transfer,” Chris notes that the first situation needs to be as simliar as possible to the second. And practicing it three times before the transfer helps, too.

Extrinsic Motivation Doesn’t Work; Neither Does “Espoused Theory”

No change will come of telling people what they should do, says Chris. Rather, you have to “give them what they want when they do it.” A useful and speedy reward or some kind of feedback that tells their brain that what they just did was good. A second problem with extrinsic motivation is that the brain isn’t fooled by rhetorical positions, claims, values statements, plans, that are different than the real behavior of the individual who promotes them (see Chris Argyris’ famed “espoused theory”). People’s brains will “see” that a given leader isn’t listening to them, even if he or she espouses an open-door policy (and maybe even if they consciously believe that policy).

Stories are Important

According to Chris, the story you create is more powerful than truth. If you’re given some pictures and told to tell “false” stories about them (that is, stories that don’t truthfully reflect the contents of the pictures), you’ll remember the stories and not the pictures themselves. Which suggests how important it is that we include stories and narratives in our understanding of the workplace environment.

The Unconscious is Powerful

“Most of what you do,” says Chris, “is unconscious.” As much as 98% (!). Chris referred to research that shows our brain can solve math problems well before we actually know it. The conscious mind, driving to a speedy conclusion, or incapable of processing all the data, can even impair the whole brain from working: Chris noted a study that showed people who were given some minor task to occupy their conscious mind actually solved complex problems faster than people who were consciously thinking about the problem, showing that the brain has a way of drawing on problem-solving capacities we don’t know about. “The brain knows,” said Chris. The way you tap into this power is to give yourself time. Add periods of unscheduled time into the routine; places for reflection, etc.